Product Description

It is not easy to face the task of writing about the Spanish architecture of recent years, because any re ection is quickly overshadowed by the situation that we all know – a very negative economic and employment environment, and a very degraded social factor. However, when analyzed further, one can detect new shafts of light that illuminate some hope. On the one hand, new opportunities are slowly beginning to take shape in the form of commissions or small-scale projects on the immense heritage already built; on the other hand, the devaluation of the role of the architect in society is very much affected by the presence of a few names that from their illustrious role, or from their lucrative anonymity, have distorted the image of the profession. Thus, these are bad times for construction,
for real estate, or for stardom, but these are still good times for architecture.
Proof of this is found in the projects outlined here. The intention of this issue is to select the work carried out or nished by Spanish teams in the past three years, with special emphasis on young teams who started their careers at the beginning of the 21st century, and surrounded by the teachings of consolidated gures such as Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra or Miguel Roldán and Mercè Berengué. Any selection of course comes with a caveat. We know that these are not all the architects who deserve a place in this publication, so this is the rst volume in a series that will be extended to other teams and projects of quality. The intention is to show that despite everything around us, contemporary Spanish architecture is still some of the best in the world. All the projects presented here have enjoyed national and international public recognition – some have been collected in catalogs, others in exhibitions, and others have been awarded prizes in various convocations of the academic or professional world.
If we review the whole of what is published, we can observe how the scale and the designs have changed – public buildings providing space for teaching or exhibition still remain, but mainly we nd single-family detached homes and projects focused on existing heritage. In other words, it is a sample of the real situation of the profession in recent years, which sheds light on a foreseeable change in the model, more European, in that it gives priority to public works, and housing is centered around its renewal or upgrading in the hopes that a demographic and economic change will again entice the recovery of collective housing.
In the projects that we present here, one can see that research is an integral part of the architectural practice, whether it be to recover a past whose traces come to light after a delicate process of seeking out the personal history of the building, or to verify a constructive logic taken to the limit, or to analyze and design the perception and experience of space by means of compositional mechanisms.
These are projects where the disciplinary rigor materializes in thoughtful proposals, sensitive with the surroundings, daring with the language and courageous with the technology. In classical architectural culture, Vitruvius spoke of Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas, and, during the Modernity, Le Corbusier replaced the triad with Economics, Sociology and Technology. These were the parameters that had to be studied by an architect committed to his time and to the pursuit of beauty. Today, it might be more appropriate to interpret the teachings of those masters and talk about Place, Construction and Programme in their broadest sense, which is not a change in the focus of architects, but only an update in the way of naming them. By Place we understand all re ections on the relationship between the architecture and its physical and cultural environment, as well as the generation of space, both interior and exterior. Construction will act to model and de ne the shape, with the appropriate techniques to reinforce the intention of the project and the appropriate resources for the concrete time and place. Finally, the Design will affect not only the size of spaces and the nal use of the building, but the deep relationship of the individual and the society with their lifestyles.
Thus, rather than a collection of works that are seemingly heterogeneous by their scale and Programme, we can suggest a common theme to all of them, which rests on the exquisite observance of the fundamental themes of the very of ce of design –the timeless themes of architecture. For example, place appears in the center of the proposals of Sol89 as the primary material of design, understood in a broad sense beyond the direct physical relationship with the placement. For the Sevillian team, the idea of place acquires transcendent properties with the passage of time, building its own history that gives it value. When the place was occupied by a pre-existence, this emits a resonance that must be deciphered and exposed through a delicate dialogue with its stonework.
The construction determines its own grammar for architecture different from other modes of approaching art. Likewise, it enables the useful occupation of space.
For several of the teams it is also the vehicle for expressing their ideas, taking a step beyond the constructive logic, letting the material speak and be governed by its own laws of manipulation and construction of its shape, like the Catalans HArquitectes, or recovering traditional materials and systems from the contemporary practice like the Ted’Arquitectes team, or experimenting with unconventional solutions demonstrating that technology can become a eld of architectural research, such as Roldan and Berengué have done in the envelope of the College of Economists of Catalonia.
The programme, meanwhile, is the trigger of the architecture, which determines the initial direction of the work, which is nothing more than to solve a problem, sometimes detected and known, sometimes surmounted by an opportunity discovered along the path of the project. The programme enables re ection on the use and habits, how to use the spaces, the way we interact and create links in society and with the place. The design understands the set of relationships that exist between users and the building, through a global cultural dimension. We do not talk, then, of a list of rooms and square metres, but rather of giving shape and shelter to human activities. In this re ection, as in previous ones, the size of the building is not what matters, but rather the depth with which it is approached. Thus, the works of Taller Básico addressed the concept of learning and its in uence on the academic staff, and especially on the students, with the excellent opportunity to do so at the beginning and the end of the system of education, with a nursery school and a university faculty. Or the always-dif cult task of designing a collective space with an exhibition function such as the Palace of Congresses in Seville from Vazquez Consuegra, where the representative dimension seeks its equilibrium together with the strictly functional.
However, architecture is primarily an exercise in synthesis, a recomposition of elements that might seem scattered at some previous moment of analysis, but that inevitably form a single, comprehensive reality. So, as interesting as xing ones gaze on speci c aspects of the buildings presented here is to seek the transversal relationships that occur among those three parameters. For example, the construction attaches a building to the place through its ability to activate the collective memory, through its volume or its materials, as in the work of Arquitecturia. Or it gives an unbiased reading of the place, which allows the insertion of non-obvious designs and brings about new uses in a pre-existence. Also, the analysis and research of a design as well known as a residence may lead to research on constructive solutions that allow one to formalize new ideas on cell aggregation, the construction of an unexpected pro le, and the appropriation of an exterior space, as evidenced by the proposals of Zig-Zag Arquitectura. Or how designing and constructing can have a dialogue in order to generate a shape that, faithful to what the material asks to be, deeply understands what living is all about in its most timeless and contemporary sense, simultaneously. This is the case of the housing of Alcolea y Tarragó, which relates to the place through a contained scale, a rigorous geometry and various spaces that are intense and open to the landscape.
So what makes this Spanish architecture good is precisely its deep understanding of the discipline as an anthropological phenomenon linked to the origin of human needs: to shelter collective relationships through a constructive logic, with the goal of transcending and activating mechanisms of memory and representation.
The collection of works that follows attests to the soundness of the current teams and lights a path of progress for future generations that promises great joys in the near future.